Posts by Brian 3

Brit data watchdog fines sleazy sales ops £250K for 'bombarding' folk with calls

Re: Pathetic

Too much violence! Just gently graze his plums over some gympy gympy leaves. Once for each call is enough.

Texas judge demands lawyers declare AI-generated docs

Re: Pot, meet Kettle?

and a lot of judges too - maybe something to do with also being lawyers...

NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

But there are so many undiscovered species of ants, still today, and it doesn't work that way at all? Even for really 'interesting' species.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: PSUs

Yes to this! Also, I like really old non-switching units for some things - my optical to electrical audio converter picks up an atrocious amount of interference from the USB hub's default power supply, but a chonky old 5v 2A rectified transformer doesn't have all that switching noise.

I was selling a dishwasher recently on kijiji, and looking at the others for sale to set the price, I noted that you could have a 1 - 3 year old Samsung for FREE or $50 at most - all of them said failed main boards. I wonder if they maybe just have dead power supplies.

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

Re: Average?

It's pretty significant what positions those relatively aged employees had, too. If you fired 50 or 60 18-24 y/o n00bs from the call center, there is a lot of room to fire expensive older staff.

OpenAI calls for global watchdog focused on 'existential risk' posed by superintelligence

..... they thought it couldn't happen, 5 more times!

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

Re: Sigh

Well, why don't you give it a try then? Go take a random shot of the night sky with your daily carry and see what you get, if it will pick up anything beside the moon if it's available. See how many seconds or minutes to get some semblance of focus?

Re: Sigh

You can't even get a good shot of a deer from 50 feet with a 4k GoPro, what do you think you'll get of something kilometers away in the sky?

Virgin Orbit-uary: Beardy Branson's satellite launch biz shutters

God forbid Richard himself invest more capital into one of his own ventures...

SF cops got warrant-free OK to watch protest via private security cameras

Re: What is needed

I remember the case of those two cops who ignored a burglary call right next to them to plat pokemon go instead, and how they were able to try and argue that the conversation that was recorded wasn't admissable because it was 'personal' talk or some such... which was thrown out of course, dereliction of duty and all going on...

FBI abused spy law but only like 280,000 times in a year

Re: How many for exPresidents

No, after repeatedly misusing the powers they should be stripped of them and serve hard time for violating civil rights wantonly.

Professor freezes student grades after ChatGPT claimed AI wrote their papers

Wait, so your right hand is quicker than your left... 'ahve' - you are using your right hand for the letter "a"?

North Korea shows off surveillance satellite it claims it can launch

" sadly without any details about the orbiter's capabilities." - finally got his hands on that GoPro 11

Activists gatecrash Capita's AGM to protest GPS tracking contract

Re: Just wait

This law is meaningless, because there will of course be no punishment for those in the government who violate it.

China lands mysterious reusable spacecraft after 276-day trek

Re: peaceful use of space

I was going to comment on this, too. Always keep in mind, there is not a government on earth that won't make violent actions "for the sake of peace".

It's what government does, after all.

FCA mulls listing rules after Hauser blames 'Brexit idiocy' for Arm's New York IPO

BRUNT, FCA!

Did anyone else read FCA and think it was about time the Ferengi Commerce Authority started cracking down?

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Re: Keyboard issues

I don't know how many PS2 ports I saw blown out from people plugging in hot, too. Some motherboards just were not OK with it.

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

I wonder how much of the "not hitting target" was engineered to be that way - much how IBM's sales got all mixed up conveniently to the execs' bonux. It's pretty easy to recategorize sales and whatnot!

Re: Remember folks.

You said "dollars outweigh sense.", but in reality it's that dollars outweigh morality and social (non-legally binding) obligation.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Re: Those are rookie numbers

Didn't you read the article? They're shaped like tiny nets!

Brit cops rapped over app that recorded 200k phone calls

Re: Australia

You must be LEO affiliated to think that it should be in any way acceptable for law enforcement to break the law. If what you suggest is true, then why isn't there a statutory exemption in place in this regard? Citizen right mean precious little already, you think we should just stop pretending they exist at all?

Does anyone else feel like the "used on 432 phones and 1024 officers downloaded the app" and it also says 1015 staff downloaded and used the app? So that would mean that it was used by 2471 phones/devices? All of them, recording everything?

Why is the person who deployed this not responsible directly? It was an accident? That they didn't do their job properly and know the software they were deploying to thousands of staff? Whoever selected this program and no doubt RAMMED it through needs their own ramming.

Starlink opens final frontier for radio astronomers

Re: Sorry but no.

He's talking about population that matters, mate. Not city folk.

Theranos founder Holmes ordered to jail after appeal snub

Re: Never thought I'd see the day

o contrare mon ami, those cabinet members and former generals are where now? They knew it was a risky venture, but not to themselves. Airtight "they lied to us!" excuses.

Tupperware looking less airtight than you'd think

I'd say the death knell was when tupperware stopped with the classic design and moved into a bunch of thinner, cheaper, worse and more disposable containers. The original ones were skookum, fit for purpose and didn't shatter if you dropped it full of sugar or whatever. Lids made a nice snap and didn't have the modern tendency to wear overly hard on the sealing edge. Modern plastic containers are shamefully lacking in comparison.

I still use an original tupperware strainer (the yellow ones)

Child hit by car among videos 'captured by Tesla vehicles, shared among staff'

Re: We need stronger laws

Don't forget how lenient courts almost always are with companies that "lose" documents and recordings they're told not to lose. Or just as often, intentionally delete after being told they must be retained.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

Re: And it's not just the number of wires

I'm calling bollocks here. I work on cars every day for my living. Wiring harness in a typical car is more like maybe 20-30kg at most. Normal couple relay boxes included. My colleague Dave sells VW harnesses all the time because they're shite. It will all fit in a medium cardboard box and is easily carried by 1 person. Most scrap yards don't bother dismantling them except the engine harness (maybe 5-10kg) - and only because they've removed the engine as it's crushed for aluminum. Your 100kg figure, only if you add all the bollocks computers and distribution boxen in modern cars (say a fully loaded caravan). Including a set of video screens and blu-ray players and more bollocks like the "distribution boxes" under the fricking seats, you say all the switches but you must be including the blower fans and actuator motors and all kinds of things to get 220lbs of stuff. All mostly plastic, which will never go away. You really think EVERY DOOR needs it's own separate computer? Several if it has "power" doors. Tailgate has 2 or 3 if it's "power" operated.

Even with a computer for every door, they still put all the wires to the window switch same as in 1980 you know? All the way to the driver's door from all the other doors with electric windows. Even though, yes, the signals all end up going through the computers. To avoid this wiring I see many newer cars put the window switches in the middle of the car so there is only 1 bank. But now the dealer can shake down the body shop when it's time to replace your door after a bang-up. And I don't really SEE the weight savings you were suggesting.

80 quid? Bollocks! My local dealer is paying $380 a ton (CDN). That's $600+ per car, another $4-600 for catalysts and maybe tire $ or alloy$ too.

This is a totally false economy - you'll still need however many amps at the back "distribution box" (think those are free?) so the feed wire will just be a big gauge. All these "smart" distribution relay boxes are insanely expensive, by the way, and have ridiculous failure rates. I bet the 19-23 generation of cars will be super extra dodgy with fake components everywhere.

What is needed is to stop putting a whole load of inappropriate tat in cars.

Smile! UK cops reckon they've ironed out gremlins with real-time facial recog

Re: 1 in 6000?

100% agreed. 1 in 6000 means DOZENS of false arrests daily. I'm only OK with this if the arresting officer and their supervisor also gets an arrest charge on their permanent record, for the same offence, for every single false arrest made.

China aims to pair J-20 stealth fighter with 'loyal wingman' battle drone

Am I the only one who heard the headline and thought of these things on the same lines as the exploding helmets for Chinese infantry? They're not for shooting down the enemy. They're more for preventing defection of valuable equipment?

Boeing's first-ever crewed mission in Starliner ISS spacecraft delayed to late July

Does anyone else get the feeling like Boeing are playing regulatory catch-up after getting caught with no pants on with the shenanigans they've been pulling last decade or so? Like just shooting from the hip this whole time and now they're like oh fuck, documentation? Standards? They're going to check for that? Uhh.. yeah, we have that.. Hold on a sec!

For so long we've been conditioned to think that only big massive companies can make stuff like aerospace successfully, but the last 20 years says strongly that they can't really do it. There's certainly no reasonable excuse to trust them to "self-certify" any more than you'd trust the guy at the street corner with a spray bottle and squeegee to "self-certify". The big company has so much to lose, yet they have nothing to lose by lying and cheating, because there's so much room to play it off. Worst case scenario they have a relative pittance of a fine - that will just get tacked on to a "cost plus" contract. Maybe they even have to set up some poor sap as a fall guy, but chances are they won't even need to go that far!

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

And really, what IS the assurance that none of the petroleum used in the vinyl came from animals? None! Or is their argument that they were already dead when they found them....

Potatoes in space: Boffins cook up cosmic concrete for off-world habitats

Sigh.

"Scientists at the famed institution have created a new material, they call "StarCrete", which is not made from actual stars,"

Maybe the hydrogen isn't made from stars but the rest of it certainly is.

NASA spots first evidence of an active volcano on Venus – in a big pile of CD-ROMs

Re: Old data new tricks

No, that's not right. Sometimes AI just shoots from the hip (the back side of the hip!) and goes full fabrication, here's your steaming fresh analysis!

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

How about that crazy overinvestment and collapse of China's real estate market? And quite a non-zero number of banks.

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Re: Video on Ring's servers is the problem

No. You NEVER allow the cops into your house!!!! That is LITERALLY the same as permission to search your house. They don't even need a warrant at that point. You let them in!

Lonestar bags $5m in seed funding for lunar datacenter project

I saw the title and thought it sounds like good work, growing seeds on the moon.

Four charged with swiping $1m+ of gear from Microsoft cargo trucks

So basically, if they hadn't registered the devices AT HOME then the CHP had NOTHING to go on? They wouldn't have had the warrants to track the cell phone locations without tracing the stolen goods first.

Ex-Tweep mocked by Musk for asking if he'd actually been fired

Re: Not necessarily……

What does Elon pay per post on here? Asking for a friend who's stuck at home...

Aussie tech worker payroll scheme operators found guilty of tax fraud

Re: 6 years?!

They'll probably get less than that because there always seems to be a BIG quantity discount on white collar crimes these days.

Intel buries news of GPU cuts and delays in low-key Friday post

"Kicking" Pat pretty much got lucky when he took over - the "Core" skunkworks basically did a complete hail mary for intel at that time. I don't think he's going to be so lucky this time.

And what happened, Reg??? Why aren't you calling him by his well-earned "Kicking" title?

US Marshals Service leaks ‘law enforcement sensitive information’ in ransomware incident

Re: Am I reading this right?

It was no doubt detected the same day because when it was done shipping out the info and encrypting everything the machine probably stopped working.

That, or it's the one machine full of their dirty deals.

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

Re: ...and just how are people expected to log into a system?

A signature is NOT a biometric marker and handwriting analysis is not admissible as evidence because it's hokum.

In the first place, biometric means it's data based on measurements or analysis of the subject's body, and NOT their writing style (a learned behavior). Biometric data can be retrieved from a corpse or an uncooperative "subject" but try getting a signature from a dead guy!

Unplug that Anker battery pack now: House blaze sparks recall

Their solution to a burney battery is to have them all collected into boxes with a bunch of other lithium packs for disposal? No more house fires, just stores and collection facilities eh?

Hi, Pakistan? You do know anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? You don't have to ask

Re: >>convince other editors<<

Ironically, sites with massive tools are probably OK; sites with females not wearing head appliances are more likely what they're beefing about.

FTC prescribes GoodRx a $1.5m pill after 'sharing health info' with web giants

Re: Sold private health data after promising customers not to?

and the fine should extend to the company officers personally as well as anyone involved in negotiating the deal in the first place. It needs to stop being okay to build corporations with the specific intent to break existing laws or circumvent regulations using flimsy arguments.

Tech job bloodbath comes to IBM, CFO links layoffs to Kyndryl, Watson Health

..and they deeply enjoy to savor the various delicate flavors, such as by-age, by-gender or with-children....

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

Re: This iis a public safety concern.

Not an EV problem, but ENTIRELY a planning and preparedness problem. It barely even gets cold there, what are you whining about? Plus, the typical altitude of Wyoming is over a mile above sea level making the cold more tolerable than it would be at or near sea level.

Did you know that european semi trucks often have more powerful engines than north american models? They're not narrower either, so what do you mean by "bigger semi rigs" ? You think they don't have B trains in EU?

If it's REALLY cold, then it doesn't matter if you have a combustion engine, because the exhaust moisture will condense and freeze in the exhaust system, plug up the exhaust and stall the engine. Been there, done that.

What you really want are plenty of waterproof matches, and some tea candles. When it's -46C and the wind is 110+KPH then you will feel the cold.

Cisco warns it won't fix critical flaw in small business routers despite known exploit

Re: Did I read that right? - software support

True Lawyer Speak: "No one made them..."